I am a gay man. In 1982 I worked with a psychiatrist, Steven Lipsius, an associate professor at Geroge Washington University here in D.C., to try to change my sexual orientation. I worked with him for about a year. Steve Lipsius told me many of the very same things that we hear in this videotape: that homosexuality is an "arrest in development" cause by a kind of parenting failure, a smothering mother and/or a cool, distant father; and that "yes, it is possible to change," for gay people to become heterosexual. And of course none of what he told me is true. Because none of it is based on science. I do not believe that psychiatrists who practice / have in the past practiced conversion therapy have ever fully owned up to how much harm they cause / have caused gay people, and also to gay people's mothers and fathers. At the time, listening to our physician, I blamed my parents for causing me to be gay, and my mother and father blamed themselves. At the time, my "therapy" ripped my family apart. Eventually, I came to understand that homosexuality is innate and inalterable. And to fully accept myself. And I reconciled with my mom and dad. But to this day, I cannot understand how pyschiatry could have gotten something so important so wrong. HENRY.

*VIDEO available at end of the post*: It's unclear to me why the Advocate posted a grainy CBS Reports featuring Mike Wallace on the then-taboo subject of homosexuality, but the video itself makes for fascinating viewing. I'm only halfway through it myself, snowed in here in Washington, and Wa...